High school English requires students to analyse texts - novels, novellas, short stories, poems, films, visual images - and answer analytical questions and write analytical essays. Learning how to analyse a text involves identifying the language, literary, poetic, cinematographic etc techniques, and analysing the composer's intention and the impact on the responder, in terms of meaning and effect. This can be a daunting task for students, but at Amanda Dixon PhD, each step of the process is broken down and explicitly taught, mostly using short stories that are easy to understand but also thematically challenging. This allows a student to get their head around the content and focus on the how toof text analysis and writing analytical essays.